5 of the Now

Some new tunes to bump to, not really any theme this time around, just stuff I have been finding interesting. No links right now, the iTunes link maker thingy/pile o' crap is not working at the moment. I'll try to add them later when it is fixed. All of these are available on iTunes.

Scientific Lifestyle - Flight 273 - The Arrow EP
I chose this song, because this was the one that Blender was showcasing that led me to find this group. I like the whole EP quite a bit, and their other album available on iTunes as well. Smooth beats, with some interesting vocals. A good blend of mellow and beats.

Big and Rich featuring Wyclef Jean - Please Man - Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace
In this case, I chose this song to spite several reviews who have trashed it (plus I know nobody will listen to it anyway...). First, this whole album is incredible. In fact, the only songs I'm not sold on are the 2 more stereotypical-styled rockabilly songs (and the horrendous cover of "Shook Me All Night Long", that should be surgically removed from all future CD printings). Everything else on here is solid, modern country and done fantastically.
This song however, is all about just having fun. Wyclef gets it, these guys have always gotten it. Sometimes it's more important to just have fun with music, than to produce some epic. Great stuff.

Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend (Dr. Luke Mix featuring Lil Mama) - Girlfriend Single
I'm throwing this on here first because I think it's cool that this made it out as an officially-sanctioned remix. Second, it's on here because it's one of the few tracks featuring lil' mama that you can get from iTunes right now. The original song I can pretty much take or leave, but I'm extremely impressed right now with lil' mama's rap skills. She has some fierce flow to her rhymes.

Air - Alone in Kyoto - Lost in Translation Soundtrack
I finally saw "Lost in Translation" this past week (yes, I'm not sure why it took me so long). Great movie, and the soundtrack is equally on-par. I have lots of other stuff by Air already, and I think this is one of the top 2 tracks on the soundtrack. Jesus and Mary Chain would be a close second.

Carbon Leaf - Learn to Fly - Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat
I would have never heard of this group if one of their videos wasn't playing on a cruise we took a few months back. More on the alternative side, but this is just generally a good song. Doesn't hurt that they cribbed the title of a great Pink Floyd track either...

Map 2 Text

So, apparently the hot new thing to do right now is send maps to your cell phone via text message.
Josh is in the middle of pulling off a nice hack to do this with weather map information. In his case, you send a text to an address, and get back a map.

Now, I see today that Google is letting you call their 1-800-GOOG411 number, say "map it", and then they'll text you a map.

Now, how about marrying it all together. Have Google wire it up so you can email like in Josh's solution, and then have Google add weather maps as a service. Best of all worlds.

Somewhere, the Bluetooth DJ is doing a happy dance...

Yeah, I would be referring to Ryan in the title. If you have read his blog at all, you'll know that he often has pined for a much simpler way of finding/communicating with people. A single contact point that can find a person no matter what.

Well Google, that no evil doing behemoth, is positioning themselves one step closer to that. There are rumors that they plan to buy GrandCentral, a service where you can call a single number and it attempts to reach the person at all of their contact numbers.

Looks promising.

Transformers Outlast the Cassette Tape

If at some point in the 1980's you had said the title of this post, I think most people around you would have thought you were crazy. At the time, cassette tapes were still unfortunately the most popular form of music around. Transformers on the other hand were just the silly toy flavor of the month (a month which somehow ended up occupying nearly all of 1985/1986 for me).

Fast-forward to the crazy futuristic year of 2007. An inbred monkey is the president, and while cassette tapes are as dead as Micheal Jackson's career, Transformers are heading back to the box office in CGI goodness. There are product tie-ins galore, lots of toys, and a blockbuster movie. At this point I declare that they have successfully outlasted the tape.

Lending more evidence to that fact was a conversation I had with my son today. First, after teaching him the finer points of Autobots vs. Decepticons, we were looking at a picture of Optimus Prime. So, of course I had to show him my original. Yeah, there it is, first generation goodness. You know you're jealous...



Now, along with Optimus Prime I had some other pretty cool transformers. They were cassette tapes that transformed into animals and robots (ahh, now you see the tie-in coming...).



I showed them to him, and after showing him how they transformed asked: "Have you ever seen tapes like these before? Maybe at Grandma and Grandpa's house?" (there was no way he would have seen one at our house). His answer was a resounding "no". Thus, he had no idea what cassette tapes were even used for, but he knew about transformers starting several years ago (thanks to my toys), and now was even interested in getting some of his own.

Now, just for the heck of it, here's a picture of another favorite kids toy (one that's been well-played with since 1982).

Light 'Em Up

This was a picture taken this past weekend while we were playing with sparklers, before our town's yearly fireworks show started. Shannon thought it looked pretty cool, and I tend to agree.

I thought it was a good way to introduce a new photo gallery that I recently created. I am going to post some of the pictures I have taken that I think work well as interesting computer backgrounds. You can find the gallery at http://picasaweb.google.com/floydpink/Backgrounds.

Browser Showdown

Following up on my previous Safari post, I noticed that Ryan had compared the screen real-estate used by the two browsers.

I'm liking Safari a bit more as I use it again, but they still need to fix the font display and some windowing usability before I can test drive it on a daily basis.

Pointing out once again the flexibility of Firefox though, I thought I would post how the 2 browsers compare on my system:

Software and the idiots who use it

I needed something to get me fired up (many of you will find that hard to believe). This will definitely do it.

As many know, Apple released a version of their Safari web browser for Windows yesterday at their WWDC developer conference. An unexpected move for many, including myself, and one that spawned a good amount of discussion and pondering.

Don't confuse pondering with pandering though, which is what many in the tech community love to do so much. The bits had barely hit the web before people were trashing the release. I'll admit, I tried it immediately, and was less than impressed with the usability and visual aspects of this particular build. Guess what? It's beta. Should this be a surprise? So, rather than bitch continuously, I simply closed it and will wait for a later version to do additional evaluation. After all, Apple actually still uses beta to mean pre-release, not perpetual unwillingness to claim completion like other companies.

The worst of these were some of the security exploits supposedly found, as covered by Slashdot. The first of these idiots is the guy who supposedly had found a bug in Apple's Airport, only to be smacked down later. He claims he found a bunch of holes, but he will not be disclosing them to Apple. Fantastic, great plan. Run around, spouting off about how great you are and poking holes in software, rather than attempting to improve something. Specifically, a beta, which is released entirely to attempt to find issues and get them fixed before release. These people need to have their Internet pass revoked.


Personally, I want to see Safari not only succeed, but excel. Mostly, because I want some competition to push my favorite browser, Firefox, a little harder. At this point, I really don't see myself ever moving to Safari. I like some of its features, but I have nearly all of them already courtesy of extensions. Extensions are still the silver bullet of Firefox for me. Also, I find Firefox to still run very snappy, and I have his memory in check on my machine. I look forward to some friendly competition between the two to keep improving them both.